Actor lays into 'trash ethos' of US films

The actor Sean Penn has a habit of biting the hand that feeds him, but yesterday he took the whole arm, declaring that film directors who wasted their talent making dumb rubbish deserved to be "sent home screaming with rectal cancer".

Hollywood has now become so brainless, he told the Edinburgh film festival, where his film, The Pledge, starring Jack Nicholson, is getting its British premiere, that anyone could now make a studio movie.

"If you are willing to put two ideas into a picture you are way ahead of the game."

In a vicious attack on the studio system, within which he still works to finance his films, he accused big name directors of betraying the public by making movies they knew were trash.

"What they are doing is on a level with raping society - and we [the public] are gluttons for punishment."

He saved his real venom for Michael Bay, the director of Pearl Harbor, this summer's US blockbuster, which has been criticised for turning one of the crucial episodes of the second world war into a meaningless love story.

"You can read about cancer or you can watch a Michael Bay picture - Those type of film makers should be sent running home screaming with rectal cancer - they don't care about the films they make, or about what is going on around them or the effect they are having on their audience."

Penn, whose hell-raising reputation and marriage to Madonna made him Hollywood's rebel of many causes in the 1980s, said some of "the best moviemakers in the US are now living in Disneyland. It is easy to understand how this happens, because there is a consistent eating away of things that don't serve the bank. The definition of a good film now is one that makes the bank happy - not one that shines a light on people's lives.

"Most of my own generation just didn't make the cut as far as I'm concerned. They have no broader interest - everything is about entertainment and no politics."

Penn, who has carved out a career as an actor-director since his The Indian Runner in 1991, warned European writers and directors that they flirted with Hollywood at their peril.

He saw hope of change because young people were no longer willing to be passive consumers of what big conglomerates had to offer. "There is a lot of stuff going on now around the world. In Seattle and in Italy, young people are putting themselves on the line - People who care about something bigger than themselves."

He said British actor Gary Oldman's film, Nil By Mouth, and Festen, the much-garlanded Danish film by Thomas Vintenberg, showed it could be done.

He described George W Bush as a "nowhere man", at a time when America needed radical change."

Penn's wife, Robin Wright Penn, who stars alongside Benicio Del Toro, Mickey Rourke, and Helen Mirren in The Pledge, about a retired cop asked to find the killer of a child, said people had to start the revolution in their homes.

"The kind of revolution we need starts with your own lifestyles - things we can change in our everyday lives that hopefully will make a bigger movement. Protecting your kids from a malign culture is a political act, and we want films that mean something."

 Danny Boyle, director of the hit film Trainspotting, last night said he was "dying to read" Irvine Welsh's follow up to the book on which the film was based, and desperate to make a sequel.

Boyle, at the Edinburgh film festival with two new experimental films which he has shot for the BBC, Strumpet and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, said he would have no trouble assembling the original cast.

He added: "We are all very much still in touch, and I know that everybody would do it."